


Press E To Lean Back

by UnderTheFridge



Category: Alien Series, Alien: Isolation (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Foreshadowing, Gen, Prequel of sorts, impending feels, professional heartbreaker and occasional circuit breaker Christopher Samuels, so much foreshadowing, tiny Amanda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-13
Updated: 2015-09-13
Packaged: 2018-04-20 15:07:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4791890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnderTheFridge/pseuds/UnderTheFridge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So there I was, creeping through Alien: Isolation tags on other people's blogs, when I found someone suggesting an AU where Samuels is Amanda Ripley’s babysitter, witnesses her lose her mother, and actually re-encounters her where the game’s canon kicks off.</p><p>And my brain went ‘let’s write a thing! it’s late at night but YOLO, right?’.</p><p>Thanks, brain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Press E To Lean Back

“How am I supposed to trust you with her, when you can _lose_ her in about a minute and a half?” Her mother’s hand plays convulsively with the lighter, but she only ever smokes in breaks at work. Never in the apartment, with the child.

“I’m terribly sorry, Ms Ripley, but -.”

“A six-year-old shouldn’t be able to hide from you, even if you’re letting her win….”

Amanda has been holding her breath, with her back pressed to the wall of the locker, for far too long now. She bursts out of the door with a _clang_ and her lungs ache on the first breath of oil-and-industry air, face already buried in her mother’s overalls.

“I’m here!”

“Amy?” Her mother laughs, startled by her sudden appearance. “So that’s where you were - oh, honey. _Tell_ me next time… I’ve been telling him off for losing you, I thought you’d be somewhere in the station….”

Amanda wraps her arms around her mother’s legs. Does this mean she’s in trouble? “We were playing. I hold my breath and make myself real small when he comes by, and he can’t find me.” She looks up at her artificial babysitter.

“What do you say?” Ripley prompts.

“I’m sorry,” Amanda says solemnly. “I didn’t want Mom to get mad at you.”

“Alright, honey. But next time, don’t hide yourself so well. And Christopher, I’m not mad at you. Just don’t freak me out like that again, ok? Next time, double-check every spot she could be in.” She smiles and rubs Amanda’s shoulder. “She can’t hold her breath forever.”

–

“…and the breakers are always set up so that when emergency power is activated, it’s restricted to one set of systems at a time. This increases the survival time of the auxiliary power reserves, and decreases the possibility of overload, especially when there might not be an automated prioritisation algorithm running to ensure that systems like life-support don’t give way to secondary concerns such as lights or security cameras….”

Amanda yawns. Samuels takes this as a sign that she’s ready to go to sleep - either because she’s tired, or because he’s bored her into a stupor. He finds all information equally fascinating, and grades his input on a basis of usefulness. She seems more interested in the cyclical adventures of a family of cartoon pigs than the complexities involved in restoring emergency power to a stricken station. But she still wishes to be an engineer when she grows up, and not a cartoon pig, because the latter is ‘silly’.

“When will Mom be back?”

“She has approximately four months left on her tour,” Samuels tells her. “She’ll be back soon.” Because how does one explain the risks inherent in long-distance space travel to a seven-year-old? “She says she’ll bring you a gift this time,” he adds, not knowing why that detail suddenly seems relevant.

“I miss her.”

“So do I, Amanda.”

“You don’t miss people,” she replies, with the surety of a young child. “Miss Ashley says robots don’t think about people when they’re gone.”

“Well,” Samuels replies, feeling a need to defend his honour as an advanced personality-type AI, “I don’t know what robots Miss Ashley has worked with, but I do think about people when they’re gone.”

“All the time?”

“Yes, Amanda. All the time.”

–

“Since her legal guardian, who appointed you, is… now no longer with us, we’ll have to relieve you of your duty. Amanda is going to her aunt and uncle, who have explicitly stated that they can manage without extra help. And there’s nothing in the known will and testament of Ms Ripley to contradict that.”

“I understand,” Samuels says, and he does. He understands everything about this, even the parts that are written in the impenetrable dialect of law. “But she’s - she’s eleven. And I’ve been with her nearly her whole life.”

The solicitor looks up. Perhaps they’re used to synthetics that state their affirmation and then leave.

“This is purely my opinion, based on experience with Amanda - but wouldn’t it be better for her to have a familiar face around?”

“Is this a plea to have the decision reversed, Mr…?”

“Christopher.”

“Because, as much as I hate to say it,” and they clearly don’t hate to say it, that’s just an expression, “you have no legal claim to the child. And, as the property of Weyland-Yutani, leased by Ms Ripley… well, that would be like entering a plea on behalf of her television, because Amanda spent so much time in front of it.”

There must be something ambiguous about his expression, because they pause and then add, uncertainly, “I’m sorry.”

“I understand.”

“To be honest, even the fact that you’ve been briefed on the situation is already out of the ordinary.”

“Can I still visit Amanda?”

“That depends on where you’re redeployed to, I’m afraid. That’s not something we can establish right now.”

He has often wanted Ripley to be around, in the way that he’s programmed to - a recalled entry in a database stating _this person is [friendly], I [enjoy] their company_. But now there is a fiercer longing, because if she was here, she wouldn’t stand for any of this. She would demand that he stay with Amanda, for as long as he could.

But Ripley is gone. There is a high percentage chance that she is dead. Even if she lives, he will most likely reach the end of his useful life before she can be found. She can’t stick up for him or her daughter, and they can’t stick up for themselves.

He has lost Amanda again, and it’s not his fault, but he still resents it.

 

Resentment is not a feeling a synthetic should experience - much less be motivated by. But it powers him.

It takes him through his job, back at Weyland-Yutani.

He doesn’t speak about his past, and they assume he’s been formatted, and that’s good.

He meets another synthetic who says ‘I know you haven’t been formatted’, and he doesn’t know how that works, but there must be something about him that gives it away. He hangs onto that as a part of his identity.

When he is redeployed, it is with everything intact. But he still finds it hard to process - a momentary error, a series of thrice-run diagnostics flashing through - when his facial recognition throws her features into focus, over a decade later.

And he just wants her to have closure.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on this post http://manemigoto.tumblr.com/post/118953807943


End file.
